Fast Simulation of Vehicular Antennas for V2X Communication Using the Sparse Equivalent Source Model

Electrical modeling of vehicular antennas is required for design of modern vehicle-to-everything communication networks. However, full-wave modeling and the existing equivalent source methods still ask for long computation time. To address this issue, a fast simulation method is proposed in this paper: a sparse equivalent source model is developed based on Huygens’ principle where a vehicular antenna is made equivalent to magnetic current placed on a finite conducting plate. The image theory and the uniform theory of diffraction are then applied, a modified Green’s function is derived, and the sparse equivalent source model is constructed to replace the original vehicular antenna. Because of its simple geometry and material, in comparisons with the existing methods, the proposed model uses significantly less expenditures for simulation of vehicular antennas while has better accuracy due to the consideration of the finite conducting plate. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method, and a real-world experiment is designed and conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method with real measurement data. It is shown that the proposed method can save simulation time by four times, with less than 1-dB error compared to measurement.